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Beckett, affect and the face

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 25; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0950236x.2011.552292

1470-1308

Adam Piette,

Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Evelyne Grossman, ‘Beckett et la passion mélancholique: Une lecture de Comment c'est’, in Engelberts, Houppermans, Mével & Touret, L'Affect dans l'oeuvre Beckettienne (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 39-52, and Yann Mével, L'Imaginaire mélancolique de Samuel Beckett, de Murphy à Comment c'est (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008). Sophie Ratcliffe, in her fine book On Sympathy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), argues that Beckett's texts ‘ask us to reimagine the possibilities and the ambiguities of how we identify with others; to recognize the contempt, as well as the compassion, that these acts may involve’ (p. 223). This performance of affect is dependent on a process of imaginary audition, as defined by Harry Berger, an interlocutionary process whereby the reader/spectator of a literary text will be called upon to adopt not only the role of listener to any text through the dramatic cues embedded in the textual situation, but also to act out the speaker's own internal audience, the imaginary audition performing the affective role implied in the inward drama of any speech-act. See Harry Berger, Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Page and Stage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), and W.B. Worthen's critique of Berger's interlocutionary theory in Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 175-9. Worthen argues that Berger's imaginary audition is an ‘armchair reading of speech as interlocution’ which ‘oddly removes speaking from the theatrical practices that contextualize it as activity, as production’ (p. 178). That odd removal is precisely what Ill Seen Ill Said aims to reflect upon. Affects are performed nevertheless. Samuel Beckett, Ill Seen Ill Said (London: John Calder, 1982), p. 51, p. 20. ISIS in future page references. The drafts of both the French original and English translation have been published in synoptic variorum form by Charles Krance, Samuel Beckett's Mal vu mal dit / Ill Seen Ill Said: A Bilingual, Evolutionary, and Synoptic Variorum Edition (New York: Garland, 1996). The ‘as if’ clause is operative within the narrative: ‘as had she the misfortune to be still of this world’ (ISIS, p. 8). But what she cannot sufficiently be is absolutely fictional: ‘If only she could be pure figment’, laments the narrator (ISIS, p. 20). This relates to Derek Attridge's argument as to the ‘as if’-performativity of language's powers involved in any true literary artwork developed in this volume. These permutations were set out in outline notes to paragraph 12 in the Reading manuscript for Mal vu mal dit ms 2203, transcribed by Charles Krance, Samuel Beckett's Mal vu mal dit / Ill Seen Ill Said, p. 157. Samuel Beckett, Proust (1931) (New York: Grove-Evergreen, 1957), p. 25. ‘Les intermittences du coeur’ can be found in vol. III of A la recherché du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1987-89), pp. 148-178. There is a further section, ‘Les intermittences du coeur II’, which concerns the break-up of his relatiomship with Albertine and consequent fits of grief and jealousy (III, pp. 497-515). Angela Moorjani, ‘A Cryptanalysis of Proust's “Intermittences du coeur”’, MLN 105.4 (1990), 875-88, (pp. 875-77). Ibid., 877. Ibid., pp. 883-88. The episode occurs in Sodome et Gomorrhe II (vol. III, pp. 157-9). Angela Moorjani, ‘A Cryptanalysis’, p. 884. Moorjani follows Liliane Fearn's analysis of the dream in ‘Sur un rêve de Marcel’ for the Saint Julien reference. Liliane Fearn, ‘Sur un rêve de Marcel’, Bulletin de la Société des amis de Marcel Proust 17 (1967), pp. 540-47. Marcel Proust, from A l'Ombre des jeunes filles en fleur; my translation: ‘Mais ce souvenir ne lui était pas agréable et plutôt que d'approfondir la honte qu'il ressentait, il préférait se livrer à une petite grimace du coin de la bouche complétée au besoin d'un hochement de tête qui signifiait: “Qu'est-ce que ça peut me faire?”’ (A la Recherche du temps perdu, vol. I, p. 514). The relationship between face and shame is partly due to what Bernard Williams describes as shame's ‘notorious association with the notion of losing or saving face […] I lose face or save it only in the face of others’. Williams, Shame and Necessity, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), pp. 77-8. Williams goes on to argue that shame is as importantly an internal recognition of failure to live up to an ideal ethical standard and need not have an audience in mind. This private form of shame is what is operative in both Proust's and Beckett's instances of affect-avoidance. ‘the longed-for eyes’ (ISIS, p. 25). The phrase is Donald Nathanson's (‘affects are expressed on the display board of the face’) in his 2000 paper ‘The Name of the Game is Shame’, available at: http://tomkins.org/PDF/library/articles/thenameofthegameisshame.pdf. Nathanson is a disciple of Silvan Tomkins and is executive director of the Silvan S. Tomkins Institute. Tomkins's Affect Theory argues that affects are hard-wired into the human brain, with specific and invariable facial signals for nine basic families of response. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Beyond Intentionality’, in Philosophy in France Today, ed. by Alan Montefiore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 100-115 (p. 109). Ibid. Ibid. I have shamelessly ‘translated’ the masculine pronoun for the face under observation in Levinas and later for Laplanche into the feminine to emphasise the maternal. Ibid., p. 111. Ibid., p. 113 Jean Laplanche, ‘The Drive and its Source-Object’, Essays on Otherness, ed. and trans. by John Fletcher (London: Routledge, 1999), 117-132 (p. 129). Jean Laplanche, ‘Time and the Other’, Essays on Otherness, 234-59 (p. 255). Ibid., p. 257. Ibid., p. 258. The inscrutability and the inwardness of the gaze – the old woman's face and eyes owe a great deal to Keats' Moneta: ‘I saw the face / But for the eys I should have fled away. / They held me back, with a benignant light, / Soft mitigated by divinest lids / Half-closed, and visionless entire they seem'd / Of all external things; – they saw me not, / But in blank splendour, beam'd like the moon, / Who comforts those she sees not’. Keats, ‘The Fall of Hyperion’, The Poetical Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), pp. 443-57 (p. 450). The identification of the old woman with the moon (‘the other marvel’ (ISIS, p. 9)) and the fact her face is described in the draft outline notes as serene, glacial and queenly (‘expression de reine’, ‘sereine’, ‘de glace’, Krantz, Samuel Beckett's Mal vu mal dit / Ill Seen Ill Said, pp. 147-8) would support this. The queenly expression may also be a glancing reference to the death of Elizabeth I, who stood or sat for hours, resisting death. The odd details in Ill Seen Ill Said such as the lack of a ring finger and moments of shock when the old woman seems to see a ghost may issue from tales of the Queen's death – Elizabeth was said to have sawed off her coronation ring, embedded in the flesh of her finger. The French ambassador, according to Michael Dobson and Nicola Watson, ‘refused to stay in bed during her last days but met her end fully dressed, silently staring at the the floor with one finger in her mouth’. A lady-in-waiting, Lady Southwell reported that the dying Queen ‘was frightened by the vision of a spectral figure of herself in a dream’. Michael Dobson & Nicola Watson, England's Elizabeth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 14-15. ‘It is misleading’, Wittgenstein argues when thinking about cases of uncertainty in guessing someone else's mental processes, ‘to think of the real [affect] as a facial expression of an inner face, so to speak, such that this facial expression is defined completely clearly, and that it is only the outer face that makes it uncertain whether the soul really has this expression’. Wittgenstein, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. II ‘The Inner and the Outer 1949-1951’ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 70. Derek Attridge's essay in this volume argues that complex writing which challenges a reader's sympathy, as with the work of Cormac MacCarthy, functions by staging the body's vulnerability to violence (as the mother figure is vulnerable to the narrative gaze) as a form of otherness to ‘derealisation of the perpetual goings-on inside our skins’. They are ethical because all ethics begins with the summons to responsibility (and the performance of affective responses) occasioned by the ‘ethical proximity’ of the face of the other (Levinas, ‘Beyond Intentionality’, p.109). That summons may very well be performing what Jean-Jacques Lecercle describes, in this volume, as the ‘counter-interpellation’ involved in the ironic stance: the maternal face is the counter-interpellative onlooker within as unconscious language event.